


Allentown

by Philosophizes



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Labor Unions, Other, Sex Work, Transphobia, political activism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 20:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4450841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosophizes/pseuds/Philosophizes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Feli Vargas was the kind of person someone would write a heartwarming true American success story human interest piece about; the sort of thing with the good-natured but debilitatingly-poor teenager staying in school and avoiding drugs and gangs to get good grades and achieve a scholarship, preferably while also working to help feed the family.</p><p>When Ludwig mentioned this to Antonio, Antonio winced and grimaced.</p><p>“Don’t… don’t tell him that,” he was cautioned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Allentown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [budgeridoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/budgeridoo/gifts).



> So this is a bit different from other things I've written. We have some warnings here: this is another _'Feliciano is trans'_ story and we've got some transphobic violence here I'm sorry to say. It's not like getting beat up on the street, but it _is_ harassment and the groping sort of sexual assault. There's also a little bit of talk from Feliciano about minor prostitution in bars.
> 
> So, gauge your reading appropriately.

Feli Vargas was the kind of person someone would write a heartwarming true American success story human interest piece about; the sort of thing with the good-natured but debilitatingly-poor teenager staying in school and avoiding drugs and gangs to get good grades and achieve a scholarship, preferably while also working to help feed the family.

When Ludwig mentioned this to Antonio, Antonio winced and grimaced.

“Don’t… don’t tell him that,” he was cautioned.

It took Ludwig a few weeks to figure out why.

He and Antonio had taken the shuttle bus into the city to go to a secondhand shop, because Antonio had gotten distracted by helping out his stage crew friends and gotten paint all over his good jeans. He was terrible at reading maps, and also liked company, so Ludwig, being a good roommate, had come along on the shopping trip, huddled in one of Gilbert’s old leather jackets that Erzsébet had let out with some denim so it would fit his shoulders.

At the checkout line, the cashier had smiled at Antonio and congratulated him on his scholarship.

On the bus back, Ludwig asked: “Scholarship?”

“They were going to give it to Feli,” Antonio said eventually. “For outstanding merit to disadvantaged students. It was one of those full-rides, that get the press release articles because they’re such a big deal and make good PR. They run background checks and stuff, so they started hunting around online, and- they didn’t like what they found. Then they tried to give it to his brother, Lovino, but he was an asshole to them about not giving it Feli. So they gave it to me. Their cousin.”

“What didn’t they like about Feli?” Ludwig asked. He couldn’t think of a single objectionable thing about the man- he’d been happy, and cheerful, and endlessly charming.

Antonio shook his head and didn’t answer.

After that, it seemed like Feli Vargas came up an awful lot in his daily life. First, there were Antonio’s phone calls to his aunt, Feli and Lovino’s mother, that inevitably ended with Feli getting on the phone and a lot of chattering in Spanish Ludwig couldn’t parse. Then, there were the electives he was taking at the community college, where, it turned out, Lovino was getting his degree. They had a drama course together.

“I can yell at people and nobody complains,” Lovino told him when Ludwig managed to open a conversation. They’d locked eyes across the room and mutually decided that the flimsy connection they already had was more than enough to warrant doing the group projects together- certainly easier than trying to work with strangers.

Ludwig was not particularly good at acting, which he had already known, but he had been forging forward in the vague hope that maybe he’d turn out to be secretly good at it, or at least competent. He didn’t feel like he had the talent it took to get good at 2-D art, and he wasn’t going to try dancing.

So Lovino was over at the dorm more often than not, working on things with Ludwig and insulting Antonio for being nosy and prying and **_God,_** _if I **wanted** this sort of fucking distraction, I’d have invited Ludwig to do it at **my** place!_  

Eventually, Antonio got sick, and in the spirit of self-sacrifice, texted Lovino all day leading up to the drama class to tell him that for his own health and safety, Ludwig shouldn’t bring him to the dorm.

They had been going to do it in the drama building, because there was apparently something else going on at Lovino’s apartment, but then the fire alarms went off and they couldn’t stay, so Lovino grudgingly got them on the bus to his part of town.

It had the sort of look that Ludwig wasn’t sure if he was supposed to call ‘crime-ridden’ or not, because it _looked_ like the sort of place where that could happen, but shabby buildings could just mean people didn’t have enough money to get them completely fixed up. He just didn’t know. He’d never actually been out on the street in a place like this.

Lovino took him up some stairs to the second floor of one of the old row homes, which, Ludwig thought, would look quite a lot better without the wallpaper someone had just painted over, and the dents.

 _“Mamma!”_ Lovino called as they walked in, and then something else in Spanish, and they were in the kitchen/dining room/living room set up, which was trying to seat about twelve or thirteen people.

They were all looking at him when he walked in, which just made the discomfort all that worse. Lovino said something else, and Ludwig caught _‘Antonio’_ , so presumably he was being introduced as _‘My class partner, he’s Antonio’s roommate’_.  

Lovino’s mother politely asked if he wanted some water or something, and Ludwig told her he was fine, and Lovino hustled him through the room to the hallway where the bedrooms were. The conversation picked back up behind them.

“What’s going on?” Ludwig asked.

“Group meeting,” Lovino told him. “Community betterment council. It’s Mamma and Feli’s baby. Feli should have been- _shit._ ”

One of the bedroom doors was open, and Feli was lying collapsed on the bed, a bag of ice over half his face and trying not to breathe too much. Lovino deserted Ludwig immediately and started talking rapidly at his brother, fussing. Feli said something back, with a pained whining edge to the words that Ludwig could understand even though whatever he was actually saying was a mystery to him.

“Is he okay?” Ludwig asked when Lovino left the room, closing the door behind him. “That looked bad. Did he go to hospital?”

Lovino looked at him and said: “We can’t afford to pay hospital bills.”

Ludwig would have thought that would have been the last of it, except the next night was the campus LGBTQ group meeting. Ludwig had showed up his customary forty-five minutes early, with a book. The group had a cover for people who didn’t feel safe admitting that they came to group, and so Ludwig could tell Antonio, every week, that he was going to Allentown’s Free-For-All Book Discussion, which had been described to him as: “a book club, but you can read whatever you like and talk about it”.

This week the group officers had decided to bring in a community speaker, so after the customary round of introductions- name, pronouns, and answer that week’s interesting personal question- Francis, the president, got up and announced the speaker.

Feli emerged from the group of last-minute arrivals, in a dress, and gave the cheerful introduction: “Hi, I’m Feli, I use he and she. I’m bigender, and I’m here to talk about local resources.”

Ludwig noticed the bruises Feli’s makeup didn’t really hide, and he was sure just about everyone else did, too; but no one mentioned it.

He caught up with Feli after the meeting, down the hall from the room and in front of the sole gender-neutral bathroom on campus. Once he’d managed to call “Feli!” from a little ways away, he found himself completely lost for words.

“Oh!” Feli said, recognizing him. “You’re Antonio’s roommate! I was going to go see him in a couple minutes!”

“Are you doing okay?” Ludwig settled for asking. “Yesterday-”

“I’ll be okay,” Feli said quickly, and then the person using the bathroom exited. “Just a second, don’t go anywhere.”

Feli ducked in, and came out sans dress, ballet flats, and make-up. At Ludwig’s look, she said: “Not everyone gets to be out.”

Ludwig walked with her back to the dorms, and managed to work up to asking about her mother’s group. Feli chattered on brightly about labor unions and community organization until they got to the room.

“I was wondering if you two would come back together,” Antonio remarked.

“Uh-” Ludwig started.

“Ludwig,” Antonio said. “Lovino was the one who came up with the idea for ‘The Allentown Free-For-All Book Discussion’. _I’m_ the one who suggested it to Francis, all the way back when we were both freshmen together. I knew _exactly_ where you’ve been going.”

“Antonio!” Feli said happily. “Ludwig wants to know about our fight against laws restricting the rights of unions!”

Things went from there.

Antonio started gently, but completely without any subtlety, directing Ludwig towards Allentown’s activist work group. Ludwig started going to Lovino and Feli’s apartment more often, technically for work, but mostly to talk. Whenever Antonio went to help with one of his aunt’s projects, Ludwig came along. Eventually, Ludwig went without Antonio, whenever Feli texted him. Even if it was just because Feli was bored and wanted to relieve it by sharing he was.

One Sunday night saw them both in Feli’s room, stuffing envelopes until past one in the morning. It was one thirty-seven by the time they’d finished and cleaned up, and Ludwig was trying to summon the energy to go outside and catch the two fifteen bus back to campus.

“The bus won’t get to Allentown until two forty and you won’t get back to your dorm until three,” Feli said. “Just say here and get the seven o’clock back.”

Ludwig fell asleep in his clothes, in Feli’s bed, and woke up sandwiched between her and the wall in the morning, _wanting._

Feli woke up at six thirty and smiled at him, snuggling a little closer before rolling out bed and opening her closet, revealing the strictly-segregated closet.

Ludwig propped himself up on his elbows and asked: “Why aren’t you out?”

Feli’s hand tightened on the shirt he’d chosen.

“It’s hard enough getting people to listen to a twenty-something with a job that pays enough that I don’t have to get another one if I don’t move out with the last name ‘Vargas’ _without_ trying to convince them to use my pronouns right. It’s… a lot easier to blow me off if I do that. And I _need_ people to listen to me, Ludwig, and I don’t need- I can stand never hearing ‘she’. So far. If it means I can I work with the labor unions and my neighbors.”

Ludwig was deliberating about whether it would be polite or somehow thoughtless to say _‘I’m sorry’_ when Feli started stripping to get dressed. He focused on hard on the ceiling.

“I’m actually doing a thing,” Feli told him as she dressed. “Next weekend. If you want to come.”

“Okay,” Ludwig said; and then Feli told him it was okay if he looked, she didn’t mind, and the mildly teased him for it as they waited for the bus at the corner. They talked about Ludwig’s classes on the bus, and then some at the dorm, and Feli hung around in the room until after Ludwig left for his morning class.

When he got back after lunch, Antonio grinned lasciviously at him and made a choice comment about the nocturnal stuffing of orifices instead of envelops, to which Ludwig replied by balling up the purple-black-gray-and-white scarf he usually used as a wall hanging in lieu of an expensive asexual pride flag and threw it at him before burying his face in his pillow.

He felt the scarf fall across his back as Antonio tossed it back to his side of the room.

“I can tell you like him,” his roommate said. “Say something to her before something happens.”

In another universe, Feli’s _‘thing next weekend’_ would have been what Antonio was warning him about. Ludwig found himself, come Saturday night, uncomfortably seated in a gay bar where people seemed to be trying to entice him into rounds of quick casual sex, watching Feli and some drag queens being very- suggestive. Past suggestive, he ended up finding out. Straight into explicit. And the clientele were, well-

“Are you- okay with them being that handsy?” Ludwig asked after they’d vacated the building. Feli hadn’t come to the bar dressed up, but by the end of the night, the bathroom he’d changed in was full of people, which was not conducive to undressing, unless she wanted to charge for the opportunity to watch.

“Sometimes there’s things I’ll accept at a club if people pay enough,” Feli said after a block or so. The club was on the other side of the city, far away from the circles anyone she’d actually know were extremely unlikely turn up. Especially given the general cultural attitude of the area. “Another night, I _might_ have undressed in the bathroom.”

“Why didn’t you?” Ludwig asked, not really knowing if he wanted to know the answer.

“Well, you were here,” Feli said. “And I didn’t want to keep you waiting. It’s easy to-”

He pitched his voice lower. The street was dark and there were barely other people around, but it wasn’t something to advertise.

“-negotiate further with lots of people around. It’s decent money for not a lot of effort and it means there’s extra for later.”

_“Why?”_

“What, why do I go on stage and make a show ofmyself?” Feli asked, snapping. He’d been holding onto Ludwig’s arm, trying to convey the image of a couple headed home from a date for anyone watching, and felt Ludwig tense up at hearing what usually happened at the club. “Why do I _whore_ myself? Because it means that _somewhere,_ out in public, people I don’t even know and don’t have to explain anything to will look at me and say _‘she’_ and call me _‘girl’_ , and _‘baby’_ , and _‘hot’_ , and sometimes I even get _‘cute’_ , Ludwig; and fuck, if they’ll _pay_ to do that, I’m going to-”

Now, Feli’s hands tightened on Ludwig’s arm.

“Feli?”

“There’s some guys following us, Ludwig,” Feli said, much quieter than before. “Nodon’tlook!”

Ludwig stopped the movement in time to- hopefully, he thought- make it look like he was just looking at Feli. He moved his arm so it was around her waist, and noticed how Feli was starting to breathe wrong, faster and shallower. They kept walking until they passed a stop with a bus, and got on.

The men came on after them. Ludwig sat between Feli and the aisle, trying to keep an eye on them without actually looking like he was watching them. They had no idea what bus line they were on, but stayed in their seats, waiting for a stop in a familiar part of the city. The men didn’t leave either, even after the eleventh stop.

The twelfth stop was Allentown Campus.

“Feli,” Ludwig said quietly, and Feli just nodded, a little, and they got up. The men were between them and the front of the bus, split unevenly between the sides. Ludwig went down on the right side, Feli on the right a little in front of him, his arm over his friend’s shoulders.

As they walked through the group, the men looked Feli up and down, a mixture of appraisal and derision, and one of them stuck his hand up Feli’s skirt, hissing something unrepeatably phobic and nasty. Feli jumped and Ludwig shoved with his back foot, pushing them past the group and to the bus door, rushing her down the steps.

The men didn’t get up to follow them, and the bus drove off. Ludwig pulled Feli along with him up to his dorm room, focusing on the goal of _getting somewhere_ so he wouldn’t have time to think of anything else.

Antonio was out for the weekend, back at his parents’ apartment. As soon as Ludwig closed and locked the door behind them, Feli started shaking uncontrollably, the tears that had been silent until now working up into sobs.

“It was the same guys!” Feli wailed, trying to tear his clothes off. “From the first time you met me; it was the same-!”

Ludwig helped with Feli’s zippers and laces and got the shower running for him. After he got in, he kicked Feli’s clothes into the corner and hunted down a shirt for Feli to sleep in.

Eventually, Feli came out wrapped in Antonio’s towel, eyes red and still trembling. Ludwig handed her her underwear and the shirt, and turned away to get his spare blanket while Feli changed. Then, he bundled her into bed and turned the lights off, finding his own way through the street lights shining through the drawn blinds over the window.

“I told one of the queens I didn’t do it for fun,” Feli said after a while; after she’d wordlessly maneuvered Ludwig into holding her tightly and backing her up against the wall. “And I thought it would be okay but then _these **guys**_ in the bathroom afterwards a couple times later, they-”

“They didn’t-” Ludwig didn’t really want to ask, and thought maybe he’d get sick from hearing the answer; but there was really nothing else to say, not after the way Feli had cut off so abruptly.

Feli shook his head, using the motion to burrow further into Ludwig.

“Th-they slapped me a little and shoved me around and one of them kicked me after I fell down, a-and one of them tore the front of my dress off and, and wrote- what they said, tonight, in permanent marker, but they didn’t- it was a different club so I just switched to another one in the same area and I didn’t see them the first time I showed up-”

“Why would you go _back?_ ” Ludwig exclaimed, dismayed. “ _Feli,_ they-”

“I _know!_ ” Feli cried. “But I _need_ somewhere, Ludwig, and that’s all- I _can’t-_ ”

There were no words after that, just sobbing until Feli exhausted herself and passed out, Ludwig finally settling down after her. They woke up late, the next morning, about half an hour before the campus dining facilities would start offering lunch. Ludwig woke up first, again, and didn’t really move until he heard his phone buzz faintly from across the room where he’d plugged it in to charge.

He disentangled himself as unobtrusively as possible and went to get it. He found a string of twenty or thirty increasingly frantic messages, from Antonio and Lovino, asking him _do you know where Feli is do you know where he went tonight GOD she didn’t take her phone with her why aren’t you answering yours Ludwig ANSWER YOUR PHONE-!_

Ludwig called Lovino.

“I went along with Feli to the club last night,” he said as soon as the call picked up. “The men who beat her up before started following us so we got off the bus at Allentown. One of them grabbed him and said some horrible stuff but he’s okay otherwise. Slept in our room last night.”

Lovino’s answer started with _‘Thank fucking **GOD’**_ and deteriorated from there, culminating in a _‘we’re coming by’_.

  Ludwig put the phone down and woke Feli up, as gently as possible. By the time Lovino, Antonio, Feli’s mother, and Feli’s mother’s girlfriend arrived, Feli was up and wearing the sweatpants Ludwig had brought to college for his ‘doing absolutely nothing’ days in addition to the shirt she’d slept in.

“You’re not going back to those clubs,” Ms. Vargas said, halfway to tears and holding Feli’s hands tightly. Ludwig didn’t think that she knew half of what her child was getting up to, but fully agreed. “We’ll _make_ everyone else listen.”

“Mamma-” Feli began tiredly.

“What?” Ms. Vargas asked, her not-quite-smile half a come-and-get-me challenge. “You think we can’t do it?”

Ludwig slowly learned not to question the authority wielded by determined community organizers. Summer break came and went, and Ludwig took two summer classes as an excuse to stay in the city, and ended up ingratiating himself with Ms. Vargas’s community development circles. Feli started things gradually, sometimes switching to women’s shirts and women’s pants for public events and meetings, and stayed away from the clubs. When regular semesters started up again, he started coming to the LGBTQ group meetings with Ludwig, and, come mid-October, started wearing thick knit skirts with colored tights and some high tan boots Ludwig had gotten her as a gift. They sat together on the meeting room couches, Feli nestled into his side, Ludwig with an arm around her, holding her close. No one commented.

Some of the labor people were… less than happy about Feli’s slow coming out. A few of them started actively refusing to work with her, but the ones who weren’t explicitly supportive found Feli easier to deal with than an angry Lovino, who graduated from the community college in that winter with an accountancy degree and a promotion in the union at the distribution warehouse he’d been working at since he was sixteen. The distribution warehouse had a lot of personal friends, and Lovino now had a position in the Teamsters’, and, well… the Teamsters’ Union covered a hell of a lot of ground. The labor activists eventually capitulated, and suddenly found their work blessedly unobstructed.

Ms. Vargas handled the community organizers, who honestly didn’t need a whole lot of work. They were more understanding of the importance of diversity and coalitions of identity. Feli started to investigate the non-college LGBTQ group options, and hesitantly started going to the trans group. Ludwig would pick him up, those days, and they’d walk together to the bus. Feli also enticed some people into the labor activism, and she and Yao and Fifi and Charlotte and Ivan formed a coalition on trans worker’s rights. Ms. Vargas got enthusiastically involved, and Ludwig mentioned it to the LGBTQ group, and Francis got _very_ enthusiastic, and suddenly it was a Thing.  

Ms. Vargas reserved space in the community center just after Christmas, and Francis brought the activism sub-committee, and Lovino brought a Teamsters’ contingent, and Ludwig came because that was Ludwig’s life now, following after Feli and waiting in the wings and doing whatever he was asked to make Feli’s life easier, to make the things Feli was fighting for become more true.

Ludwig couldn’t think of a better way to spend his life.

From the community center, everything took off. More coalitions were made, and lawmakers contacted, and things drafted, and suddenly they were a news item and over Easter Break, which Ludwig had had to go home for- _‘you missed last summer, Thanksgiving, **and** Christmas!’_ his grandfather had protested- and in Gilbert’s hospital room the early news had a bit of a press conference/rally thing that Ludwig had helped Feli pick out an outfit for; and there were Feli and Lovino, up on the platform, looking a little foreboding with the line of Teamsters behind them, and Feli’s friends from the group and Ms. Vargas and her organizers off to the sides.

“Allentown, huh,” Gilbert said. “You heard about this, Lutz?”

And Ludwig had a moment of panic, but he couldn’t lie about this, not with how his plans were, so he said: “They’re friends of mine. Antonio’s their cousin, and I’m going out with Feli.”

There were a lot more questions after that, some of them not entirely polite but that was in ignorance and not malice, and Ludwig made it through all right. After Easter Break there was an explosion in articles and op-eds and eventually Ludwig and Lovino made it a rule that Feli should have one of them with him when he tried to read them, because it was better to have emotional support.

After finals, Ludwig used up the rest of his semester’s printing allowance to run off the worst of the articles, invited everyone along to the grilling pit outside the dorm, and they burned the articles instead of old homework.

Summer was spent on awareness-raising and agitating for people to call or write in their support, in rallies and statehouse runs, in the little minutiae of running what felt a lot like a political campaign, really; and the college administration became intrigued and, with their ever-present sharklike instinct for good PR hunting, told Ludwig his work counted as an internship and he was getting college credit for it. Ludwig tried not to tell Feli about it, but Feli found the letter, eventually, and her expression twisted so badly that Ludwig wanted to write the department and tell them they could shove their credit.

Mid-September, the vote on the bill went through, and Ms. Vargas hosted a potluck the likes of which had never before been seen in celebration. Feli was beaming, all night, and, in a fit of good humor, actually spontaneously interacted with reporters.

“What are you going to do next?” one of them asked.

“Well,” Ludwig heard Feli say. “I’d like to go to college.”

In late October, almost a year after the bill had first taken off, there came a letter from Allentown, offering Feli one of the slots for the scholarship that had gone to Antonio, the full ride, in the upcoming year.

“Fuckers,” Lovino said when he saw it.

“It’s a shit thing to do,” Feli agreed. “But I’m going to take it. I won’t get the chance, otherwise.”

So it came to pass that, in Ludwig’s senior year at Allentown, Feli began her freshman, despite being a full seven years older than him.  Ludwig graduated a semester early, courtesy of summer classes and credit, and jumped from college straight into one of the positions he’d been offered on the basis of his work and Ms. Vargas’ and Lovino’s recommendations. He started at the Disadvantaged Citizens’ Action in February. Feli started to tag along, and, well… the obvious developments happened.

Another story began.

(Less obvious to strangers, and the halfway between this story and their next, was that at Feli’s graduation, Ludwig made an embarrassing spectacle of himself that he was completely willing to count as not an affront to his dignity when Feli took the ring and said _‘yes’_ )


End file.
